Power
and Island Communities: excavations at the Wardy Hill ringwork, Coveney,
Ely by CHRISTOPHER EVANS
East Anglian Archaeology 103. 2003, 307 pages,
145 figures, 12 plates. ISBN 0 9544824 0 9. (£25.00)
Wardy Hill is a commanding location on the edge of
a former marshland embayment in the western part
of the Isle of Ely, a major topographical eminence in the southern Wash
Fenlands c. 20km north of Cambridge. Today it is topped by a World War
II pillbox (illustrated on this report’s frontispiece), but this
eagerly awaited report makes clear that this is only the most recent
defensive feature to have stood here. This volume deals with major excavations
at Wardy Hill by the Cambridge Archaeological Unit in 1991–2 under
the auspices of the Fenland Management Project. All of the work was
funded by English Heritage.
A significant body of Bronze Age evidence might indicate
an embanked or enclosed landscape here in the later 2nd millennium BC,
but the focus of the project was a prominent network of Middle–Late
Iron Age crop-mark ditches. At its heart lay a bivallate ringwork, one
of a number of defended features of this period known in this part of
East Anglia. Evidence for six round structures – four of them
substantial, and at least one of which may have preceded the construction
of the ringwork proper – was concentrated in the southern and
south-western parts of the interior. Although some important questions
about chronology and sequence remain unanswered, the excavation results
indicate that the site had been occupied not only in the later Iron
Age, but also into the later 1st century AD by people using Roman-type
pottery. A large and varied body of artefacts derives both from excavation
of features and from exhaustive test-pitting and surface survey. This
report has been some years in preparation, but this schedule has offered
opportunities to strengthen contextual appreciation of the site by considering
the results of post-1992 excavation at a number of other Iron Age sites
in the vicinity of Ely.
The report’s structure is innovative, and offers
a contribution in its own right to ongoing discussion about how we write
and present field reports. Evans and his colleagues sometimes present
familiar subject matter in unfamiliar and stimulating contexts. The
second chapter offers a comprehensive narrative of site structure and
sequence but also considers present-day fenlanders’ perceptions
in its account of the recent evidence. Chapter 4 on artefacts is relatively
conventional in format and is dominated by J.D. Hill’s report
on the 60kg of pottery recovered – although a fragment of a remarkable
decorated tankard or bucket stave offers a sharp reminder of the profusion
of wooden and wicker objects that are lost to the archaeologist under
all but the most exceptional circumstances. Yet the two chapters bracketing
the finds report stand apart from familiar practice. Chapter 3 presents
the palaeoenvironmental evidence, and the decision to reverse the usual
system of considering ecofacts after artefacts is vindicated
by its synthetic strength. Its concluding discussion not offers a full
consideration of the evidence for subsistence and agricultural practices
but also considers the local environment’s human carrying capacity.
All in all, it makes a stimulating prelude to the artefactual account.
Chapter 5 is entitled Articulating settlement structure and re-addressing
sequence. Here the large body of ploughsoil evidence – more
usually offered as a preliminary to the stratigraphic narrative in a
site report – is interpreted vigorously in a fully illustrated
account that considers these results in terms not only of changing trends
in the use of space but also of decline and abandonment processes. Researchers
seeking a case study in extrapolating total artefact populations from
plough-damaged archaeological landscapes that have seen only partial
excavation need look no further!
The concluding chapter is entitled Violence, power
and place. Despite the closely argued interpretations offered by
Evans and co-workers, both in this chapter and elsewhere in the book,
they are often circumspect when presenting their main conclusions, highlighting
uncertainties and unresolvables and noting topics for future research.
Some of the chronological evidence is challenging, and Chapter 5 includes
a frank discussion of the implications of a Bayesian radiocarbon chronology
that indicates an earlier start to the occupation span than might have
been suggested from the pottery evidence alone. The presence of quantities
of late 1st-century Roman pottery indicating activity well into the
Flavian period also raises interesting discussion points. Even if the
site had not lain in Icenian territory, many readers will find it intriguing
that a local Iron Age settlement network (Evans’ intentionally
neutral term), and possibly a resident elite, persisted here in the
post-Boudiccan decades. Although he suggests that the absence of the
more prolonged Roman occupation seen at comparable sites nearby might
indicate an eventual unseating of some kind, there was no evidence for
any violent termination. Indeed such an outcome could have been achieved
indirectly by means of economic or social disruption.
Readers will find a full consideration of the ringwork’s
possible appearance and defensive character, along with quantitative
analysis of the labour resources that its erection might have involved
and the issues of control and direction that they raise. When discussing
enclosure morphology and function, the report argues carefully against
viewing a need for defence as a simple response to a high prevalence
of warfare in this part of the Iron Age fenlands. In so doing, it invites
us not only to consider the possible symbolic significance of this architecture
in the exercise of social control, but also that any conflicts which
it saw may have involved relatively small-scale incursions, which need
not have left any tangible archaeological impact. The report emphasises
the site’s farmstead-like characteristics, and the apparent importance
of the areas of open space that it seems to have enclosed. In addition
to its residential function, it may have acted as a refuge or assembly
place.
A comparative study of enclosure morphology places
Wardy Hill alongside other Iron Age sites in eastern England and beyond.
This embraces the network of peripheral ditched outworks (Evans’
term) as well as the ringwork itself and the features within it, and
considers (amongst many other topics) the possibility that the distribution
of some shared defensive features and concepts reflects the inter-regional
dissemination of ideas. Unanswered or previously unposed questions are
given prominence, and some of these are couched provocatively –
for example, what is it precisely that makes it appropriate to classify
the well-known Late Iron Age site in Norfolk at Fison Way, Thetford
as a ceremonial enclosure, whereas some other enclosures with which
it shares characteristics have been viewed as defensive or domestic
compounds?
The way in which activity persisted into the late
1st century AD makes Wardy Hill’s large artefact assemblages significant
to anyone interested in using material culture to characterise processes
of Romanisation. Here the report’s authors emphasise contact and
acculturation, rather than continuity. It is argued that while the absence
of coins is not necessarily significant in this non-military environment,
that of metal dress-fittings and grooming equipment to accompany the
Roman pottery is of much greater interest – not least as a fuller
package of objects seems to have been well established by this time
in areas only a short distance to the south. Hill argues that the composition
of the late pottery assemblage is inconsistent with Roman table habits,
and this supports the impression that the people using the ringwork
had not adopted fully Roman modes of behaviour.
The final discussion of the island settlement network
within which Wardy Hill was situated extends the study of social space
beyond the limits of the site itself. Although the island setting for
this drama may appear an exceptional one, the questions posed here will
interest any student of the dynamic processes that generate evidence
for prehistoric landscapes. Is the ringwork’s settlement context
best seen in terms of a thread of continuity from earlier prehistoric
occupation, or did it arise from Iron Age ‘colonisation’
of the Ely claylands? And how important were choice, convenience and
factors of power and control in the manner in which this settlement
pattern developed over time (for example, in an apparent tendency towards
the compounding of enclosures in the later Iron Age)? Questions of this
nature dealing the nature of social cohesion are of special importance
given the suggestion that the ringwork was an assembly place. While
Evans suggests that the Ely settlements might have represented a northward
Catuvellaunian incursion, the various uncertainties and irresolvable
factors are emphasised too.
Mention of the Catuvellauni in these final pages of
the report emphasised – to this reader at least – how little
it invokes the documented events of the period of the Roman conquest,
depending instead on exhaustive interrogation of the available archaeological
resource in all its forms. The fact that this reviewer has lived and
worked in Icenian territory for many years may have strengthened this
impression upon him! Despite its unique interest, the historical narrative
relating to post-conquest events in this region and the Boudiccan rebellion
can still provide unwary archaeologists with opportunities for circular
reasoning, and powerful temptations to seek correspondence between archaeological
phenomena and historical events. Future archaeological research into
the Iron Age and conquest period in East Anglia would do well to consider
the advantages of the rigorously questioning approach to archaeological
evidence that is the hallmark of this report.
Trevor Ashwin
Norfolk Archaeology
Review Submitted: March 2004
The views expressed in this review are not
necessarily those of the Society or the Reviews Editor.
|